It's always worth reading anything written by the prolific and perceptive Walter Russell Mead.
Here he is on how we need to invent Liberalism 5.0:
Briefly, the idea is that after World War II America was organized around a group of heavily regulated monopoly and semi-monopoly companies. AT&T was the only telephone company; there were three big networks, three big car companies and so on. There was very little foreign competition, and these companies were able to offer stable, lifetime employment to most of their workers. The workforce was heavily unionized, and the earnings of the big companies were divided between shareholders, managers, workers and government in a predictable way. An intellectual and administrative class of planners, social scientists and managers ran the big institutions and administered the government.
Several forces came together to break up this system. Foreign competition, first from rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II and then from low wage newly industrializing countries around the world, eroded the market position of companies like the Big Three auto manufacturers. The rise of offshore banking eroded the tight financial controls of the postwar era. Growing consumer impatience with the high prices and poor quality offered by monopoly companies like the telephone monopoly led to political pressure to deregulate and introduce more competition. Technological change, especially in information processing and communications, led to disruptive changes that shifted the advantage to nimble and lean companies and left the bureaucratic, slow moving giants of the Blue Age behind. American society became increasingly individualistic, with both the left and the right rebelling against the authority of experts and bureaucrats.
As a result, the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore. Some of the changes—like the multiplication of gadgets and rise of the internet—are widely considered to be wonderful things. Others, like the rise of instability in financial markets, the polarization of incomes and the consequences of the collapse in manufacturing employment for blue collar employment and wages, are much less popular. But the reality is that there is no going back to blue; Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and he can’t be patched up. The question is what do we do now.
That is indeed the question. Read the whole piece to see his oddly optimistic answers.
Probably - hell no, certainly - the biggest policy and moral failure of President Obama is to say anything serious interesting about all this. Insofar as he has any discernible views on these issues they boil down to sucking up to champions of discredited Blue Model instincts (organised labour) and proliferating the numbers of people depending on handouts or handing them out. His eight years are a staggeringly expensive waste of precious time spent ignoring the need for radical reforms.
Likewise the European Union. The main problem with the EU now is that it is essentially unreformable in any 'Less is More' way. So competitiveness and confidence edge downwards, and the answers proposed by the usual elite suspects (usually more centralised power in Brussels) tend to make the deeper problems even worse.
Here in the UK the Coalition government in some ways seems to identify that the current model can't work, but is hesitant or shifty or confused (the Big Society?) in doing anything meaningfully different.
Most of our political problems in the West are about these issues. Most of our political process is devoted to avoiding doing anything about them. Discuss
